Cuba is still mostly without power after the national grid went down

On Saturday morning, most of Cuba still didn’t have power because the island’s grid had failed the night before, cutting power to 10 million people and raising new concerns about the country’s old power system.

At sunrise, UNE, the island’s grid provider, said it was only making a small amount of electricity—about 225 MW, or less than 10% of total demand. This was enough to power some important facilities, like hospitals, water supply centers, and food production centers.

Authorities said they had started to turn on the country’s decades-old power plants, but they didn’t say when service would be back on.

Around 8:15 p.m. (00:15 GMT) on Friday, Cuba’s grid went down because an old part of a transmission line at a center in Havana shorted. This set off a chain reaction that stopped all power production on the island, according to UNE officials.

After a string of nationwide blackouts at the end of last year, the grid crash threw Cuba’s already weak power grid into almost complete chaos. Fuel shortages, natural disasters, and the economic crisis had made things even worse.

Many people in Cuba outside of Havana have been living with rolling blackouts for months now. In the last few weeks, they got as bad as 20 hours a day.

On Saturday morning, most of Havana still didn’t have power. There was light traffic going through intersections with broken stoplights, and in some places cell service was weak or nonexistent.

Early Saturday morning, Abel Bonne sat with friends on Havana’s Malecon waterfront street and enjoyed the cool sea breeze after a hot night without power.

“Right now, no one knows when the power will come back on,” he stated. “This is the first time this has happened this year, but last year it happened three times.”

People in Cuba are leaving the island in record-breaking numbers these past few years because they can’t afford to stay because of severe shortages of food, medicine, and water.

Cuba claims that a Cold War-era U.S. trade ban is to blame for its economic woes. This is a complex set of laws and rules that makes it hard to do business and get things like fuel and spare parts.

On Saturday morning, a grid official said that Cuba had been unable to update old transmission and production parts because of the rules.

Recently, U.S. President Donald Trump put more restrictions on the communist-run government of the island and promised to return to a “tough” policy toward the longtime U.S. enemy.

Yunior Reyes, a bike cab driver from Havana, was back at work on Saturday morning even though the power was out. He was worried that his food would go bad in the heat of the day.

“We are all in the same situation,” he stated. “It’s a lot of work.”

(Dave Sherwood did the reporting; Nelson Acosta and Anett Rios did more reporting; Susan Fenton edited it.)